Next time I plan on putting a competition on, it’s going to be a completely random draw. The closing date was a week ago and I’ve been reading emails and tweets and agonising over who to select for days. I finally had to call on help from my significant other to choose two winners for the competition.

The chosen ones

The first winner is Brian Arnold from Albuquerque, his entry could be summed up as “Family sickness and poor corporate policies kept him away from the past two SXSWs.” We liked his entry, therefore one printer’s proof will be winging it’s way to Brian next week.

The second winner was Christopher from America. He can’t go because he’s having a baby in six months, but we’re all not supposed to know for another little while (hence the lack of a surname and the slight ambiguity of where he’s from). We like positive stuff and keeping secrets, Chris is our second winner.

Caught my eye (ouch)

I received a large number of reasons for not going to SXSW, but two caught my eye as they made me laugh (LOL, ZOMG). The first from Mike Montgomery who ended his entry with

“I would be shunned by the masses but I would end up with a cool nickname like Typhoid Mike“.

That line deserves a spot prize alone, so a runners-up prize will be going to Typhoid Mike.

The second was from Maykel Loomans who said he couldn’t go to SXSW because he’s

“scared of Vampire Robot Ninja Pirates who are also Zombies, and the French.”

Maykel is from the Netherlands so I suppose he should be scared of the French.

Hey, what can I say? I’m easily amused.

OMG, That is like, sooooo random

So onto the random picking of a third poster. As we received few entries from people who were actually going, I put everyone into the draw for the third poster (except for the two winners above) as it was stated that you could enter both competitions.

So, in the interests of transparency (opacity: .2;) I decided to share with everyone, my method for randomly picking a winner.

I have often wondered how other people pick random winners and I often ponder whether it’s really random or not. The only way to be sure was to use the some complicated code to produce a random winner. So I compiled the list of entries into a PHP array and I used the following code to give me a random winner:

Magic, eh? The resulting winner was Mark van den Corput (definitely randomly drawn, as Mark is our second winner from the Netherlands!) Congratulations, you win the third printer’s proof. But wait, there’s more. This random winner generator was just too exciting to leave alone, so I refreshed the browser and hey presto, another winner who goes by the name of Zachary Nicoll. Well done, I will send you a small prize for being chosen by the PHP gods.

Wrap-up

After all that excitement, I really need a holiday, but unfortunately we’re very close to launching so I will have to go back to work. Thanks to everyone for entering, you were all great, if I could, I’d give prizes to all entries (but I guess it wouldn’t be much of a competition then.)

Stay tuned to @usewebstandards for more information on the Support Web Standards products. You could also follow me on Twitter for some more PHP masterclasses.

I was reading a blog post over on jameslarkin.ie regarding calculating your hourly rate if you’re a freelancing web designer. Even though I have the form of a business, I am more or less a freelancer, so these articles are always of interest to me.

Hourly rates are something that can be calculated in a fairly straightforward manner, an hourly rate is basically:
Your overheads per hour + Your wage per hour + Profit per hour = Hourly Rate

When I began working for myself, I calculated my hourly rate. The thing is though, I never really use it. I mostly deal with other small businesses who contact me to either redesign and rebuild their current website or create a new website for them. I have a rough idea of the time involved in both processes, but when I multiply those hours by my hourly rate, the cost per website is very low, too low. What gives?

Costing a job is a usually a pain, raising questions such as ‘am I costing too much’, ‘am I costing too little’, ‘am I being competitive’ etc. I think I have my costing worked out, so I’m going to share my method here. It’s the same method I have been using for the last two years, but it’s only since reading the aforementioned blog post that I was able to put a name to it- Pricing by Value.

I take absolutely no credit for this, a gentleman by the name of David Winch, a consultant in sales and marketing, has a DVD about the topic. I discovered Mr. Winch through the comments on the above blog post, who posted a comment explaining why you should be Pricing by Value rather than multiplying hours by an hourly rate. I haven’t seen the DVD, but after reading his comments, pennies dropped and I realised he was able to articulate the method of pricing that I have been using for years.

To better explain Pricing by Value, I’ll use an example:-

I go to the shop and I want to buy a new laser printer. The salesman says that there’s Printer A, which will do 10 prints a minute in black ink or there’s printer B which does 30 prints a minute in full colour.

He’ll then hit me with the prices for the two.

At no point will he say, “This costs more because it took longer to make and the parts are more expensive”. Neither of these are a factor in the price, they’re a factor in the manufacturers cost of production, which is then used to calculate price.

The manufacturer isn’t going to inform the customer how much time and resources goes into making the printer, they’ll just set a price for the printer, what they feel it’s worth for what it will do for you.

Now I know everyone will jump off their seats and proclaim “Hey, we’re providing a service, we’re not selling a product”. If you’re dealing directly with the customer (as opposed to doing contract work for another company), and you’re producing an entire website for them, then you are selling a product (that you have created) to your customer. This is why you should be pricing jobs in relation to what the website can do for your customer.

David Winch puts it very eloquently:-

You shouldn’t charge what the Client is willing to pay so much as you should charge what the Client sees is a moderate investment for the return, the value they will get from working with you. If you feel this modest investment is unprofitable for you, either decline to take on the work or, more likely, you haven’t helped the Client enough yet to see the full value of what they will get by working with you.

I can guarantee that a business in need of a website, will not approach a business or a freelancer and say “Hey, I need a website, what’s your hourly rate and how many hours will it take?”

Businesses and individuals approach me and tell me they want a website. They also tell me what they want this website to do (sell stuff, allow potential customers see product portfolio etc) and if they don’t, we sit and discuss the project until we both know what the purpose of the website is. Once I know what they want to do with the website, I then sit down and work out the cost based on what this website will accomplish for the customer.

Ok, so how do I cost?

Sure, we all know that finding out what the customer wants is the first step (and often the most difficult), but how do you determine how much to charge the customer?

Hourly Rates

You will need to decide upon your hourly rate, if only to make sure you aren’t losing money when costing. There are plenty of resources online, like the aforementioned blog post, if you do a search, you will find plenty of tutorials on how you can calculate an hourly rate. Like with everything else, your overheads will be different to mine, so it’s important that you calculate your own hourly rate, rather than using someone else’s.

Going Rates

Your next step is to do some research to establish the ‘going rate’ for similar work. This is a difficult process, but is really necessary to ensure you’re competitive and profitable.

Here’s a few suggestions to help your ‘research’:-

Ask other businesses-

I don’t think approaching other businesses with the opening line of “I’m trying to work out my pricing for my business, which also happens to be your competition” will work, nor will filling out their Request for Proposal (RFP) forms with phony project details (this will bring you nothing but hassle and bad karma). The only recommended way would be to look for published pricing details either on their website or advertisements. Not the most recommended option for obvious reasons.

Ask friends in other business-

This only works if you have friends in a similar business, but chances are, if you do have friends in a similar business, you’d have asked them already.

Ask potential clients-

I have two types of potential clients, people who have a website already and are looking for a redesign and those who are starting from the start.

The first type will have already paid a web professional (most of the time) to create their previous incarnations so I’d ask them what they paid for the previous website. Be careful though, ask them casually without seeming forceful (i.e. “out of curiosity, would you mind if I asked how much you paid for your previous website?”)

The second type usually have no idea of budgets etc., so they usually get multiple cost estimates. If you are their first call, then they’re no good to you for this exercise, otherwise you should try convince them to tell you how much they’ve been quoted from other businesses. Your explanation could simply be that you want to provide a competitive estimate for a similar spec for the customer.

Using potential clients to ascertain the going rate is a good way of getting information for costing purposes, just make sure you get the details (project spec) of what the other costing is for.

When gathering costs, they should always be from a similar business to yours, for example-

The size of the business should be the same (ie if you’re a freelancer, try get the standard prices for other freelancers, likewise small businesses, likewise big businesses).

Try get a business you think would have similar overheads. A business in a big city has larger overheads, which inflate costs. If you work in a small town, you should be passing on the savings in overheads to your customer (you don’t have to, but being more competitive is an advantage for your business, not just your customers).

The product of your work should be the same- If you’re doing web standards-compliant work, which is very accessible, you should be looking at businesses who produce similar websites. If you’re using Joomla or Wordpress as your CMS, you can’t really charge the same as a business that builds a custom CMS or uses an enterprise-level CMS.

Remember! This information is for reference only, this is your business, the ultimate decision on cost is up to you, for good or for bad.

Timing is everything

You should have a really good idea of the length of time it takes you to do a project. Personally I like to divide a website into different parts, and cost each part separately. This cost is derived from three different factors, time it takes to complete this part, hourly rate and what I feel this part is worth. Different parts are divided into two different categories, the parts that are absolutely mandatory to a project and the parts that are additional to fulfil a specification.

Examples of some mandatory parts:-

• Initial consultation
• Design
• Initial implementation of our CMS (we don’t really do non-CMS websites).
• Post-launch work (setting up Google Analytics, Favicons etc)

Examples of some parts that I add on as needed:-

• Photo Gallery
• Date-ordered events Listing
• News/Blog pages

Keeping track of the time implementing each part is a task onto itself, sometimes estimation plays a significant part. It helps if you actually have work in that you can time each section. When I started to work out my pricing, I kept a list of all the different parts of a project beside my computer and filled the time in as I went along. I further subdivided each part into the individual tasks involved in implementing a part. This is useful at the planning stage as well and also if you’re using a Getting Things Done (GTD) approach.

It takes approximately four hours to implement my photo gallery code and style it to suit the site, but what I charge my clients is not four hours multiplied by my hourly rate, instead I charge what I think having a photo gallery on a website is worth.

So I work through the different parts of a website, and keep a record of the costs of different parts, for pricing purposes. There is always the issue of bespoke work, but once you’ve worked on standard parts (news articles, photo galleries etc.) it’s fairly easy to estimate the time to do bespoke work.

I’ve used examples of mixed work, i.e. design and development, because that’s what I do, but it also applies to any project where you are giving the customer a finished product (website), as opposed to a part (HTML/CSS templates).

At this point you should have a spreadsheet assembled with all the factors in place, to allow you easily assemble a cost for your potential customers. I won’t go into it here, but if it’s any help, I may detail how I use a spreadsheet to work out costs efficiently in a future post. Let me know in the comments.

Charging more than your time?

So now you know how long a project will take, you have an idea of the ‘going rate’ so you’re confident enough to cost any projects that come in, but if you’ve even somewhat efficient and you’ve been keeping up with what the Jones’ have been charging, you’ll notice that: Time to complete the project * Your hourly rate < Researched-Project-Cost

How do you justify the extra chunk of cost in a project?

Put simply, the hourly rate pays your wage and your overheads and the extra other bit keeps you in business. That’s your cashflow/rainy-day-money. This is paid for the clients best interest. Andy Clarke said it very nicely in his post, aptly titled Worth:

Your value is in more than just the hours, days or weeks that you spend working on your current job, or the next. Your value to your clients is that you’ll be there for them, to help them when they need it, in the future.

At the end of the day, you are getting paid a decent wage, your overheads are being covered and your business has some cash flow. Your client is receiving a quality product at a reasonable price.

Costing is a continuous process, there are so many factors that are constantly changing, you have to stay on top, and keep your costs updated. Regardless of whether you’re a freelancer, small business or large business, you are still running a business. Successful business people do not have any qualms over increasing their pricing- whether it’s an increased demand for your services or lack of competition, the purpose of a business is to turn a profit, a profit is there to allow you to stay in business (which is beneficial to you and your clients) and expand your business and services (which is also beneficial to you and your clients).

A few days away from the launch of a possible new Apple product (Canvas, iBook, iSlate?), and I’ve finally finished a five year loan for my current two computers. Yes, yes, I have been running my business on a five year old G5 PowerMac.

I bought my machine when I was in college (back when banks were giving loans to people for sport) and it always served as my home machine. It served me faithfully through college (I worked in the evenings creating websites) and when I eventually began working for myself in January 2008 (after a short spell working for The Man), I, of course, used my trusty G5 in my home office.

After a lot of early morning commutes, I took advantage of self-employment by sleeping and working late. It was in this first year that I started doing, on average, 10 hour days. I’d start about 10.00am, work until six, cook and eat dinner and usually head back to my office for a few more hours. I never had any problems with working like this, simply because I liked the work I was doing, and by getting it done faster, I was getting paid faster.

At the end of 2008, I had an opportunity to move into some office space, and for numerous reasons (mostly more space and better heating) I moved my office out of my home and into my new space. I convinced myself that by having a separate office that my work/life balance would be better, I wouldn’t feel obliged to work in the evenings, I could keep office hours, get my work done without the distractions of a home office (long lunches, short naps) and generally be as productive or even more productive in a separate office space.

After a gruelling year I realised a number of things-

• Even though I was more productive in the development side of my work, the more creative design side was suffering (who’d have thought that creativity doesn’t kick in after morning coffee).
• As Jon Hicks noted recently, when self employed, the amount of work hours actually done is a lot less than eight, due to paperwork, more paperwork, phone calls, emails, meetings and a little bit more paperwork.
• Having an office outside of your home is really, really convenient and beneficial for client meetings- a lot more professional.
• Even though I increased the amount of work done in the year, I probably could have done more.

I thought I could solve my work/life imbalance by working in a separate office space, but the imbalance swung the other way. I now spend a lot of free time in the evening twiddling my thumbs, thinking I could be doing something more productive than trying to ignore the crap on the box.

I was always planning on upgrading my machine this year and I was considering a shiny new iMac, but I think it’ll have to be a MacBook Pro instead. Even though I’ll probably repeatedly curse the decision, as I pack the machine up every morning and evening, I think in the long run, it’ll allow me to be more productive all round.

I plan on doing a lot of side projects this year, and I don’t plan on spending warm summer evenings in a stuffy office.

I hold an honours degree in Printing Management and even though I am now a web designer (a long story for another day), most of what I learned during my four years in college still stands to me in my day-to-day running of my web design company.

In the third year of my course I had a lecture each week called Operations Management. The lecturer was really great, he had some great insights into how a production-based business should run, not just from a theoretical standpoint, but also from a pragmatic point of view.

One such insight was when he told us that when referring to any process, the old saying “practise makes perfect” should really be “practise makes permanent”. A guy (or gal) who picks up bad habits during a period of time or is initially taught incorrectly, will then proceed to do their task or job incorrectly, unless corrected.

The lesson was that you must constantly check your processes, whether it’s a human or mechanical process- time has a habit of changing things, one way or the other.

The web is such a fast changing medium that you can easily pick up techniques and habits on a day-to-day basis. Even though publications relating to the web, like books, can go out of date quickly, their benefit is in reassessing what you know and the way in which you’ve been carrying out your job. This allows you to correct yourself and continue on progressively enhancing.

This is another belated post, this time for an exhibition which took place in June, 2009. Due to several reasons (lazyness being the most prominent) I only wanted to use a single screen for this print, but printing a solid colour is boring. I had seen a print on Flickr (seen here) which used multiple colours at the same time on a screen. This is commonly known as ’split fountain’ printing.

Split Fountain is when you put multiple colours in the fountain or ink well. In commercial printing, this is most commonly done when printing currency- if you’ve ever seen currency with multiple colours blending into each other, if you check out the printing under 10x magnification, you’ll see a consistent blend of colour with no halftones. This not only makes forgery that bit harder to do, I’d assume it makes the printing a bit of a pain, because of potential cross-contamination of inks, affecting the colour.

Only recently I came across this process on the excellent For Print Only website- a couple used this technique for printing their wedding cards.

Artwork

For the artwork, I had some silhouettes of trees that were in the ditch outside my office. I reversed the trees, so the image of the trees would not be printed. After creating the screen, I went to work in earnest. My first colours were an orange, (shitty) peaches and yellow colour scheme. I produced a couple of prints using the split fountain technique, and it worked really well. The only problem was that the colours, although blending together nicely, were too separate still. I did a number of prints squeegeeing along the long-edge, mixing up the ink half way through- I wanted a mixed up texture, not perfect bands of colour!

Black, Red and Grey

After cleaning up the screen and scooping the excess into an empty pot, I set the screen up again, this time I was squeegeeing short-edge down. I decided to use a black, grey and red colour scheme. Although the first few prints were fine, the black overpowered the other colours, making the prints very muddy looking.

Shades of Blue

My next colour scheme, having learned from last time, was a collection of blue hues, allowing for more subtle blends of colour, as opposed to a single colour overpowering everything else. I added in some Silver to the colours too, to give it more texture and affect. I was happy with the prints. Using shades of colour worked a lot better.

Longways

For my final trick, I decided to back to the orange, shitty peaches and yellow colour scheme, but print the short-edge down. I used the ink I scraped off the first print run, so the ink was thoroughly mixed up at this point, giving better mixed-up textures.

Twofer

In the run up to the exhibition, I had trouble choosing which print to enter into the exhibition. After much deliberation we decided (it was a group decision at this point) to put in two prints as one, commonly referred to as (but technically incorrect) a diptych. I use a local framer, who is so good all I have to do is give a basic direction and she decides everything else. I have yet to see a badly framed picture from her.

The diptych was exhibited and sold on opening night. More photos are on Flickr.